


The Water Remembers

by Silex



Category: Original Work
Genre: Flash Fic, Gen, Ghosts, Jellyfish, Magical Realism, Ocean, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-12-23 19:37:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21086705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: Even if the sea is long gone the memory of it persists.





	The Water Remembers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Allekha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allekha/gifts).

Even if people didn’t occasionally find shells high in the mountains they would have known that the valley had once been the floor of a vast sea. The waves lingered in the shape of the land and the hollows left behind to become lakes.

And on some nights strange things would drift past in the fog, soft, translucent bells for bodies moving, not with the wind, but memories of currents tens of thousands of years gone. Luminous strands trailing from them snared fish made of slivers of moonlight, as well as flying insects unlucky enough to be out on those nights.

For anyone caught out on those nights their touch did little more that leave a profound sense of sorrow and a longing for inexplicable things as they passed through as though not even there.

On those nights if men out fishing on the lakes vanished it was accepted as fact that they had drowned, for there was only so much longing that one could take before casting themselves into the moonless depths were stranger creatures might still swim.

After all, some of the lakes had no floor and the bones that washed up after storms weren’t always those of humans.

Occasionally the glowing forms would be sent tumbling in the wake of far larger, even less substantial things.

In the spring it wasn’t unheard of for farmers to unearth great, arcing ribs taller than a man, slowly worked to the surface by countless freezes and thaws, just as new rocks turned up in the fields each spring.

If the mist broke enough for the stars to be seen above occasionally they would be blotted out by some vast form passing overhead, nearer than the clouds, but mercifully too high for its passage to be felt by anything solid and real.

It was said that years ago, a hundred or more, one of them fell like a blot of smoke onto a field leaving behind a shallow depression where plants grew wrong. Tall and healthy, but bitter and subtly wrong.

In the morning as mist fades and the unseen tide ebbs occasionally those softly glowing things are left behind, bodies and tendrils spread out in pale sunburst patterns across the ground. With the rising sun they slowly collapse down on themselves, nothing left to hold them up as they shrink away to nothing and salt smell of a remembered sea.


End file.
